At the End of the Road (16 page)

Kenny used his mind to draw the boy to him. He set the thoughts in motion and waited for the universe to deliver.

He knew it had been a big risk, using the boy to clean up his mess. The boy could be home right now, telling his parents. The police might be on their way this very minute. But what choice did he have? The county workers would have found his discarded pets. What a God Almighty mess that would have been. Body parts strewn across the yard.

There was a knock at the kitchen door. Kenny peeked out the front window and saw a green Pontiac Catalina sitting in the driveway. Opal Phillips!
For the love of God.
He went to the door and smiled warmly at Opal. She was holding a Pyrex casserole dish nestled in a little yarn cozy she had undoubtedly crocheted herself.
Christ, give me strength.
Kenny reversed his chair and ushered Opal into the kitchen. She leaned over and kissed him on the forehead, and Kenny could just feel the lipstick staining his head like malignant melanoma.

“Oh, Kenny, how are you getting along?”

Already she was starting in on the longing looks. Kenny could feel his skin crawl. This was not what he had asked the universe to deliver.

“Fine. Just fine. You are so good to come see me, Opal.”

“Why Kenny, I just think about you nearly every day. You need a woman around here to look out for you.”

“You are too sweet,” Kenny managed, his mouth already dry as lint.

“Just look at your face. It’s a mess.” Opal produced a Kleenex seemingly from nowhere, and swooped down on Kenny. She picked away the tight little balls of white spit that had formed at the corners of his mouth. God, how he hated her.

“Opal?”

“What is it, dear?”

“I need to tell you something.”

“Go right ahead.”

“I’ve developed feelings. About you. Feelings about you.”

A fire lit in her eyes. “Feelings?”

“Yes, and I need time. Time to pray on it. Time to sort out what I’m feeling. To talk to God.”

“Why Kenny you don’t have—”

“I’m on a spiritual journey now. Spiritual.”

“But God wants us to—”

“None of us knows what God wants.”

“But, Kenny, I care for you too. You know that.”

“I need guidance. From The Lord.”

“Of course. We all do.”

“And time. To pray. I just ask you that. You better go.”

Confusion replaced—but didn’t extinguish—the fire in Opal Phillips’s eyes. She wasn’t sure what had just happened. Was it victory? Or defeat? It was hope, she decided.

“Kenny Ahearn, you talk to God. And I will too.”

“I want you to stay away for a while. I think it’s best.”

“You’ll call me? When you’re ready?”

“I’ll call. But give me time.”

changing. It wasn’t like him to toy with Opal like that. What was wrong with him? Maybe it was the stroke. He indulged in a daydream imagining that he had indeed been caught, that the county crew had unearthed the bodies. He imagined how the sight would have sickened them. The police would be called. Newspaper reporters would show up, shouting Kenny’s name, hoping for a quote. The Atlanta TV stations might come down here too. The church people would be shocked to their very souls, and they would tell the TV reporters that Kenny Ahearn was a quiet man, a good Christian man. And Opal. Opal Phillips would be shaken to her crocheted core. Kenny giggled.

Across the road, the corn parted and the boy emerged. The universe had delivered. Kenny flipped a switch on his wheelchair, and the motor hummed low as he navigated it into the house. The boy followed.

was like they were friends and he was having Kyle over for a glass of milk. Except they had been sitting there at the table, not saying anything, for a good long while. And it wasn’t milk in the tall glass sitting in the middle of the table. No, the fluid in the glass was a cool neon blue. It could’ve been Kool-Aid, maybe. But it wasn’t that either. Kyle knew what it was. It was Liquid Drano. The tall red, white, and blue bottle it came out of was sitting right next to the glass. He had made Kyle pour it, because he said his wrist was sprained. Tough on clogs, the bottle proclaimed. Won’t hurt pipes.

The paralyzed man’s eyes were blue too, like the sky might look over the North Pole. They were so blue that they hurt Kyle. They cut him. And he could feel it all over, those eyes cutting into him, trying to get into his mind. Trying to charm him.

“I can make you drink that,” he said. “Do you believe me?”

Kyle didn’t answer him, because he did believe him. Kyle did believe that he could make him drink it. That he would end up just like Joel Sewell. He would be disfigured. He could imagine the way it would feel in his mouth, how it would burn away his tongue and eat his flesh.

“Now I don’t mean that I’ll physically force you to do it,” the paralyzed man said, and Kyle noticed that he didn’t mix up his words anymore like he used to. Like he was getting better. “I mean that if I tell you to, you will pick up that glass of acid and drink it.”

He just stared at Kyle and held him in those polar eyes, cutting him up like a thousand frozen knives.

“Pick it up.”

Kyle didn’t move.

“Your sister will do whatever I say. I can call her over here. With my mind. Do you believe that? I changed her. I put a piece of me inside her. Do you want me to summon her now? She’ll drink it for me.”

The thought of the paralyzed man putting Grace under his spell was all it took. The thought of him tricking her into tasting the pretty blue drink. Kyle reached out. The glass was warm, like the acid was giving off heat. Kyle picked it up. He couldn’t resist those eyes. He couldn’t. He couldn’t. He couldn’t. He couldn’t. He couldn’t.

He couldn’t.

Kyle took the thick fluid into his mouth.

It coated his tongue, and he spit it right back out. He waited for the pain, for the burning. But it didn’t come. The paralyzed man was laughing. He was laughing so hard his face turned red and tears came out the corner of his eyes. He reached out with his sprained hand and gingerly picked up the metal Drano bottle. He took a deep chug off it. “It’s cornstarch and unsweetened Kool-Aid, boy. I wouldn’t kill you. Not yet. Do you think I’m crazy? You’ve got work to do. Now listen, I want you to reach up in that cabinet there and reach down them crackers.” Kyle got up and did like he told him. “Them orange ones right there,” he said. “Now reach in the Frigidaire there and get a co-cola. Now run that upstairs. To the attic. My pet’s hungry.”

“In the attic?”

“Yes, boy, the attic. She’s a mouser. Catches ’em and eats ’em.”

“And you want to feed her crackers and co-cola?”

“You ever ate a mouse? Ain’t very filling. Now you run along and be back directly. Directly, you hear?”

night. With the window exposed, she felt the passage of time. She enjoyed the daylight and the view of the outside world, but she was starving to death. Her lips were hard and dry like crinkled tinfoil, and she had no saliva in her mouth with which to lick them.

And then one day she heard people outside the house. Men working with nails and hammers and electric saws. Their voices, muffled, floated up to her. She had no way to signal them. Nothing to throw at the window. She had no voice with which to scream. She could perhaps try banging on the floor with her fists or her heels, but she had no strength. She could no longer move. She was dying.

The next day, the monster came back. When she heard the cars pull up the drive, Melodie found the strength to stand up and look out the window. She saw a station wagon and an old Ford pickup. Two men hopped out of the pickup’s cab and set about unloading a heavy-looking wheelchair from the bed. A woman dressed like a nurse opened the back door of the station wagon. The monster was inside. The woman dressed like a nurse reached in the car and pulled the monster up to her. She held him braced against her hip, pivoted, and dropped him expertly into the seat of the waiting wheelchair. The monster tried out his wheelchair. His disguise was grinning. He drove the chair out of sight, then back into the driveway. Each of the men clapped the monster on the shoulder, then climbed back into the pickup and drove away. The nurse and the monster came into the house.

Later, after the nurse left, Melodie thought that the monster would come for her, but he did not. Days passed. The attic held all of the heat from the house as it baked in the midsummer sun, but Melodie could no longer sweat as her body was so dehydrated. Her skin looked wrinkled, mummified.

On the third day after his return, Melodie heard the monster on the stairs. There was the creaking door. Then the familiar sharp hollow sound of a boot striking a wooden step. That was followed by a new sound: a little rubber squeak. And then the rustling sound of the monster dragging its dead part up the step. And again. The hollow strike, the tiny squeak, the dragging of the dead part. And again.

The attic door opened and Melodie’s first thought was that the monster had changed his disguise from harmless old man to some kind of robot. His head was covered in a metal helmet and long lenses of steel and glass protruded from his eyes. And then Melodie recognized that he was wearing night vision goggles. Her daddy had brought a pair just like them back from Korea. And she understood that was how the monster was able to see her and do those things to her in the blackout room.

“Still alive? Just barely, I see.” The monster unbuckled the strap under his chin and the goggles fell to the floor. He pivoted on his crutch and reached down into his pocket. He tossed a can of Coca-Cola and a package of fluorescent orange Toast Chee crackers at her. He leaned against the wall and looked around the room, nodded at the little pile of mouse bones, then lifted the cane to indicate the exposed window with remnants of black plastic hanging from it. “You’ve got it looking right pretty in here.”

He watched Melodie fumble with the can of Coca-Cola. Even if she had fingernails to pry up the pull-ring, she clearly didn’t have the strength. “Reach it back up to me.” The monster wedged the can between his body and the crutch, removed the pull-ring, and dropped it on the floor. “Scooch back.” Melodie complied, and the monster poured the soda into the bowl, the precious dark liquid sloshing and fizzing and spilling over the rim onto the wood plank floor. Melodie rolled onto her stomach and lapped from the bowl. The effect to her body was like a shot of amphetamine—an instantaneous jolt. When she looked up, the paralyzed man was already gone. She realized now that he wasn’t a monster at all. He was just a man, paralyzed and broken.

A monster could not be beaten, but a man could.

Melodie used her teeth to tear open the package of crackers. The smell hit her like an electric current. She devoured one, then two, then three. She decided to save the remaining three crackers, to ration them, but then she ate a fourth one. Then she ate the fifth. The last cracker she wrapped back up in the cellophane package and saved it for thirty minutes before she went back to it and ate it and licked the cellophane clean. Melodie saved the wrapper; hid it out of sight under one of the black plastic trash bags that she had torn from the window.

Off to the side, just within her range of reach, Melodie spotted the pull-ring from the can of Coca-Cola on the floor where the paralyzed man had dropped it. She retrieved it and hid it under the plastic bag too. The night vision goggles were beyond her reach.

It turned out that there was no reason to ration the crackers, because the paralyzed man returned once a day. He always brought the same thing—a can of Coke and a pack of peanut butter crackers. He said it was all he could fit in his pockets. She could tell that the paralyzed man was getting stronger. It took him less and less time to get up the stairs, and his speech was growing clearer. And he was looking at her again, in that way. And Melodie understood that before long the hurting would start again. But she was growing stronger as well. And every day he dropped the pull-ring on the floor, and every day, Melodie retrieved it. She had ten now. She discovered that she could crimp the metal ring around the end of her finger so that it held tight, and the curved metal tab would extend from her fingertip in a sharp claw. The metal was weak and flimsy, but the edges were sharp. With a set of ten, she would have opportunity for one good cutting swipe before they broke or bent. If she got his eyes, once would be enough.

Melodie heard the familiar strike/squeak/rustle sound on the step. She was ready. She was wearing her pull-ring claws. She held her hands out to look at her creation one last time. To her, her hands looked like an Indian goddess. She didn’t know which one, but she remembered seeing a picture in a book of a Hindu woman with elongated metal fingertips.

The aluminum rings were cutting into her skin where she had crimped them tight, but they had to be good and secure if she was going to use them as a weapon. The oval tabs curled out and under, like talons. She could do some real damage. She put her hands behind her back and waited. But something happened. She heard the sound of the boot strike and squeak countered with the dragging of the dead part only twice more. Then there was faint muffled noise. Then nothing. The paralyzed man never came.

She waited a long, long time. Hours it seemed. She was ready to do this now. She had about given up and was going to take off her metal claws when she heard footsteps on the stairs. They were light, and made soft little squeaks instead of heavy strikes. Whatever it was (maybe the monster had a helper), something was coming up. Melodie hid her hands behind her back and relished the musical sound of her metal talons clicking together.

the stairs.

His mouth was still slimy from the cornstarch. He felt like he was a zombie. He had seen a movie on channel 17 called
White Zombie
with Bela Lugosi. A man and a woman go down to Haiti and down there a shaman can bring back the dead. Once you’re brought back from the dead, you can’t think for yourself anymore, and you’re under the control of the one that brought you back. That’s how he felt. Like he wasn’t thinking for himself anymore. The paralyzed man had him under his control. It was easier to be under someone else’s control, to not have to think for yourself. If he was thinking for himself, he sure as hell would not have knowingly taken a swallow of Drano, not knowing full well what it had done to Joel. And if the paralyzed man could control Joel like that, then why wouldn’t he be able to make Kyle do any damn thing he pleased?